Talks on Writing English. First Series

by Arlo Bates

Local color in the modern sense was invented in the present century. It is true that the writers of other times had employed the same device before, but it has been consciously sought and has been supplied with this name within recent times. It might be asked by a cynic why the quality is any better now that it is ticketed and talked about in reviews than it was in the days of Theocritus and Kalidasa and Boccaccio; but so many things have been used before modern generations were thought of that if we are not to have the privilege of regarding things as new when they have been newly named we are likely to be at a desperate loss for novelty.

By local color is now meant the bringing out of the peculiarities of the locality where the scene of a tale is laid. It is evident that there is no spot so poor as not to have characteristics which distinguish it from all others. It is the aim of many modern story-tellers to give this especial local flavor with the most faithful and often painful vividness. Indeed, there are not a few recent stories which seem to exist for no other reason than to exploit the accidental qualities of remote and hitherto undescribed places.

This is an age in which competition between periodicals has waxed warm, and to the desire of editors to procure novelties is largely due the increase of the already rather tiresomely abundant examples of local color and of dialect. An air of freshness may be imparted to a tale by laying the scene in places practically unknown in fiction. Accidents of custom and manners arrest the attention for the moment, and it is due to this fact that the great mass of stories marked by this peculiarity have succeeded. The principle is not unlike that of drawing a crowd to the theatre by new scenery. A tale which is really vital can do without local color, as a really strong play succeeds without elaborate setting.

This is not, however, the whole of the matter. A good play may be helped by novel effects of scenery and a tale good in itself may be improved by local color. Detailed description of local peculiarities may make more clear to the reader the character and the motives of the personages in a narrative. All men are influenced by their surroundings, and to be familiar with unusual social conditions is often essential to the understanding of acts or opinions which have been done or held under them. To make intelligible the story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne was obliged to set forth something of the manners and morals of colonial days. Scott could not have made comprehendable the tale of Rob Roy without giving some idea of what life in the Highlands was like in the time of that redoubtable chieftain. The author must in any case impart to the reader whatever special information is necessary to the best effect of his fiction.

The comment which it seems fair to make in this connection is that here is to be applied the rule which should govern the management of all details in narration,—namely, that everything shall be kept subordinate to the central purpose of the work. So long as particular description aids in bringing out more clearly the main idea of the whole, so long as it is used as a means and not as an end, so long as the setting is kept subordinate to the story, so long it is good. The moment what is called local color is allowed to dominate a story, it must injure the permanent effect. The literary mechanic who is writing stories simply to sell them will usually find it easy to dispose of studies of local peculiarities which are piquant, whether they are true or not. There is nothing to object to in this, but this work is not to be confounded with legitimate Narration, and it is not to be looked upon as permanent literature. Local color is accidental rather than essential. It depends upon circumstances which belong to a place rather than to human nature. It follows that it is not in itself of permanent interest, and that work depending upon it for interest must go by as soon as the novelty is passed. The work of Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Miss Brown, and the rest, has attracted attention through the fidelity with which it presented peculiarities of New England rural life. The claim to permanent value in each, however, rests on other and higher grounds. In so far as they are true to the fundamental and essential characteristics of humanity, in so far as they deal with the constant emotions of men and women as men and women, and not as eccentric types evolved by peculiarities and environment, they have permanent value—and no farther.

Closely allied with local color, and indeed in many cases hardly to be distinguished from it, is dialect. We are all familiar with a certain strange appearance which has of late years come over the pages of the magazines, a sort of epidemic of which the most prominent characteristics are the misspelling of words and a plentiful spattering of apostrophes, as if the secret of literary art lay in eccentric and intermittent orthography. We have been instructed that these startling productions were dialect stories, and whether we have professed to like them or not has depended largely upon our daring to say what we thought. There are, it is true, dialect stories which we must all admire and enjoy,—many of them in spite of their strange language rather than because of it,—but none the less is the multiplicity of tales in dialect a visitation not unlike the Egyptian plague of swarming flies or of sprawling frogs.

The object of the use of dialect is of course to produce what might be called a personal local color. To personages who belong to nationalities other than his own a writer often gives phrases in their own tongue or conforming to the idiom of their own language in order to convey a lively impression of their being foreigners. To produce a vivid sense of the fact that his characters are Creoles of New Orleans and to suggest all the romantic flavor of life among them, George Cable used dialect in that delightful book, “Old Creole Days;” to make the reader realize the especial local and race peculiarities of one character or another Thomas Nelson Page used one negro dialect in “Marse Chan” and Joel Chandler Harris another in “Uncle Remus.” In these and similar cases the dialect used is really, as far as the general reader is concerned, an unknown tongue. Its correctness or incorrectness cannot be judged by the general public to which these tales are addressed, and its use must therefore be flavor rather than accuracy, impression rather than information, picturesqueness rather than literalness.

The proper use of dialect is often a great aid in characterization. Some figures it is all but impossible to individualize without this means. There are figures in Scott which would not be at all the same thing if stripped of their dialect; while in each of the stories mentioned above there are instances of the same thing. It is to be remembered, however, that this is a subsidiary purpose. In other words it is a detail of fiction. Dialect is written for the sake of the story, and woe to that author who produces a story for the sake of a dialect. The tales of the “Soldiers Three,” the “Window in Thrums,” “Old Creole Days,” succeed for other qualities than the dialect, and the dialect is good because it helps to make effective something better. It is even not improbable that with a large body of readers these and kindred books succeed only in spite of their dialect, since even at its best this perversion of language is apt to be in itself somewhat irritating even if not perplexing.

Actually to reproduce a dialect as it is spoken is a feat so difficult that it is worse than idle to attempt it outside of works on philology. Dialectic peculiarities are always largely matters of accent, of voice quality, and of inflection. The sounds of vowels and consonants may be indicated, but it is all but impossible to set down the rising and falling of the voice which is the most characteristic quality of these forms of speech. Printed words cannot reproduce that species of intoning which has so large a share in making unintelligible to foreigners the speech of London cabmen and porters. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether any written dialect is to be regarded as a very exact reproduction of the genuine thing,—a statement which would probably be regarded with contemptuous anger by the devotees of the dialect story, if any still survive. Certainly it is true that dialect does not have to be genuine to be successful. The dialect of the “Biglow Papers” was never spoken on the face of the earth. It is none the worse for that, so far as I can see. It has the effect for which it was intended, and nothing more could reasonably be asked. Mr. Lowell made it with the most careful patience, and apparently believed in it with beautiful faith. He set nothing down, or rather he tried to set nothing down, which he had not heard from the lips of Yankee rustics; but in the first place no one man ever used all those distorted words and phrases, belonging sometimes to different localities; and in the second, letters cannot reproduce the peculiar sounds and accents of rural New England. Yet this dialect has imposed for a quarter of a century upon no inconsiderable portion of the American reading public, and it will probably continue to impose upon English readers until the end of time.